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Comment by tobinfricke | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what a blast from the past. I learned to program with BASICA.EXE and GW-BASIC as a kid in the late 80's.

I just noticed that microsoft has also released the source to MS-DOS 2.0: https://github.com/microsoft/MS-DOS

I don't think I ever imagined that I'd be able to "look behind the curtain" like this, let alone that Microsoft would come to embrace open source.

From there I moved on to Turbo Pascal 3.0, and then Borland Pascal 7.0 (which I loved - super fast compiler and superb IDE - many examples and comprehensive documentation - which were a must in the pre-Internet era), then Borland C. And then Linux and gcc for the following two decades.

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Thirty years later, I still miss the Turbo Pascal / Borland Pascal, Borland C(++) experience. Few, if any, 'modern' IDEs have yet reached the simplicity and ease of that development environment.

I've been toying with Turbo Pascal 5.5 running on FreeDOS on an old laptop. There's something really relaxing about it, compared to modern programming.

Turbo Pascal 5.5 with objects was the pinnacle of my programming enjoyment. Python 3 is catching up.

Because the development itself has changed immensely. The closest experience today is probably the one of developing for Arduinos.

Homebrew scene for consoles and graphing calculators too, I'd say. I think the overarching reason is that you know the platform you're developing for all the way down to the hardware.

I loved Turbo Pascal back in the 90s, that was the first IDE I ever used.

I think Visual Studio 6 is equivalent in ease of use and user experience -- that's what I learned C++ on back in the early 2000s, before the influx of Java and Python into academia.

Free Pascal is still around, and still includes a text mode IDE written in their own fork of Turbo Vision.

Am actually totally digging JS DOS, the emscripten build of the DOSBox emulator. The performance is phenomenal in the browser, including vsync. Here is an example (CPU intensive) of multiple 64k demos running simultaneously on a single web page ;)

https://js-dos.com/6.22/64k/index.html

8 FPS on MacBook2019 and Chrome...

27 to 31 fps on a 2.6 GHz MacBook Pro (Late 2013) in Safari. Try Safari, maybe?

I’m getting 6fps on my iPad Air 2 in safari...

Similar story, learned to program using GWBASIC and loved figuring out how to recreate Conway's Game of Life, fern fractals, etc on my own. Though 25 years later can't pass FAANG whiteboard interviews with just an EE degree!

> Though 25 years later can't pass FAANG whiteboard interviews with just an EE degree!

Nor could I. But I think that's ok.

I remember trying to make a game using a BASIC interpreter on Sinclair ZX80 Soviet clone and failing. Yet, here we are on HN taking about tech and leading lives in tech, whatever that means for us.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I'm glad for that experience and where it got me. And, I guess, I'm glad that you're here as well, stranger.

Haha likewise mate, cheers

You and I both - first time I ever touched an IBM PC XT (in my Dad's office), I immediately fired up BASIC and went to town (had already been programming BASIC for 18 months by that time).

It was the first time I ever saw him just stare in awe at me like I was an alien's child! :)

And me! (and a few hundred/thousand people in this great forum)!! Oh I still remember that Amstrad PC1512!!! What a carefree age that was...

I learned Locomotive Basic on a CPC464, then moved up to a PCW8256 before transitioning to a PC1512. Those were the days :)

I learned to core in C on a PC1512, using Walter Bright's rather nice Zortech C compiler. TP3 was indeed the dog's bollocks back then, too.

I recall GW-Basic as well. I ended up with a bunch of random software from my dad at the time. One of the included items was a basic compiler. Showed me how much faster compiled code could be.

I then went on to use the various Borland products.

BASICA.COM :)

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